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How the smoking ban killed bars, etc. (cough)

The smoking ban in Washington state covering bars and a bunch of other businesses, which went into effect in December 2005, was long fought as an economic nightmare, a killer that would savage a whole range of rtail businesses.

Except, apparently, that just the reverse happened: A new state Department of Revenue report says that business has jagged sharply upward ever since the ban went into effect.

We won’t press the point too far; there are lots of reasons, not just one, that a business may do better or worse. The department is careful to say that it “asserts no cause and effect relationship between I-901 [the anti-smoking initiative] and industry revenues.”

Still. For Washington bars and taverns, annual revenue growth in the three years pre-901 averaged 2.1% a year; in the two years after, the average growth was 9.7%. The total of food service and drinking places statewide (many of which were non-smoking beforehand) showed no significant change, from 6.8% average growth to 6.9%.

See also the item in the Slog (“Wasn’t the smoking ban going to destroy bars?“) about this.

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